Slow Man

Slow Man. By J. M. Coetzee. Viking, 208 pp., $24.95.

Philosophy Made Simple. By Robert Hellenga. Little, Brown, 288 pp., $23.95.

HOW DO TWO agnostic men--unsure of the existence of God and with no religious affiliation--deal with the coming of old age, disability and death? J. M. Coetzee and Robert Hellenga, both novelists with impressive track records (Coetzee received the 2003 Nobel Prize in literature, and Hellenga is the author of several highly acclaimed previous novels), fruitfully explore this terrain in their most recent books. Both deal with men in their fraught 60th year. A bicycle accident sends Paul Rayment, Coetzee's protagonist, flying into a constricted life. In contrast, a series of impulses and visionary moments lead Rudy Harrington, Hellenga's main character, into an expanded life. The two men couldn't be more different, yet the similarities between their transitions into old age are striking.

Rayment, an Australian photographer, is a solitary man who never remarried after a childless union and early divorce. Harrington's life has been focused on his wife, Helen, and their three daughters. The loss of his leg confines Rayment to his apartment and his neighborhood. Harrington's wife's death and his grown daughters' independence propel him from Chicago to Texas, where he buys an avocado ranch. But for both men the longing for love and family is central, as is the struggle to understand and find meaning in the pattern of their lives. The comic, the absurd and the fantastic mark the year for them both. And both insist on continuing to have stories of their own, rather than giving in to the sensible patterns others want to impose on them.

Rayment's brush with death, which forces him to put on the raiment of disability, propels him into an examination of his life, a life he finds frivolous and unproductive. He sums himself up as a person who has done neither significant harm nor significant good, who has slid through the world leaving no trace behind. "If none is left who will pronounce judgment on such a life, if the Great Judge of All has given up judging and withdrawn to pare his nails, then he will pronounce it himself: A wasted chance." What troubles him most is that he has no children, that he has not achieved even the earthly immortality of passing on his life to a son. So in a sometimes darkly comic way, he sets out to get a son.

As he regains his health, Rayment falls in love with his nurse and caretaker, Marijana Jokic, a happily married Croatian immigrant with three children, and tries to adopt her whole family, especially her 16-year-old son, Drago. The inevitable complications are both comic and poignant. Though Rayment, who has an ironic mind, is well aware of his own absurdity, he is unable to stop himself. He sees himself as someone whose close encounter with death has left him haunted by the idea of doing good, a desire that he traces to his Catholic boyhood: "Jesus and his bleeding heart have never faded from memory, even though I have long since put the Church behind me," he says. And he resists the suggestion that in his efforts to be the fairy godfather of the Jokic family, his own heart may not be entirely pure.

While Rayment sees his life as a failure because he has given so little nurture to others, Harrington has been a nurturer in a way most often practiced by women. He has found the meaning of life in his family, has cooked the family meals and has made life smooth for his career-minded wife, an art history professor at a Chicago college. Although his wife has been dead for seven years when his story begins, he thinks of her constantly. He tries, above all, to come to terms with her affair in Italy during the year she directed a student-abroad program, an affair that ended only when she learned she had cancer and came home to die. What had she discovered in Italy that she had not found at home? Had she been heroic in following the romantic adventure that gave her so much vitality and pleasure? Would she have come back to him had she not become ill? And can he, even at his age, still find love and something of the ecstasy his wife experienced in Italy?

Though neither novelist pays much mind to traditional religious notions of an afterlife, both suggest the possibility of alternative worlds. It seems extraordinarily difficult for anyone, with whatever doubts about God and the afterlife, to really believe that consciousness ends with death--that death is all. When the fantastical enters Rayment's life in the form of an unexpected guest named Elizabeth Costello, a character from an earlier Coetzee novel, he posits an unusual life after death to account for her. Costello arrives at Rayment's door claiming to have been sent and apparently knowing everything about him, including his thoughts, and she subsequently tries to direct his life. Is she writing him into a future novel? Or is he already one of her creations, real though he knows himself to be? Or, he asks himself, "Is this what it is like to be translated to what at present he can only call the other side?"